Documentaries

Free the Pedos said:
Necroing this thread to ask if anyone can recommend some good history documentaries. "China, A Century of Revolution" is a comfort watch for me. (part 1 of 3)

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"The Sorrow and the Pity" is a classic documentary about the Fall of France in 1940 and the German occupation of France through 1945 with lots of post-war interviews with key figures in the wartime French and British governments and many ordinary French people on all sides of the political spectrum and even a German officer who was with the occupation. Although all the interviews and narration is in French, it's a really famous documentary, so there are good English subtitle versions.

Another French-produced history documentary that surprised me in how much I enjoyed it was this one, about the North African campaign in WW2. It was filmed on location in North Africa, probably in the 1960s, featuring interviews with French, British, German, and Italian survivors of the campaign, with many of the interviews being conducted and filmed at the exact battlefield locations. That really impressed me, to see these officers and veterans standing at the very site of their combats some 20 years before and recollecting what personally happened to them. The British and German interview subjects speak really fluent French, too, so you don't feel that any of their thoughts are lost in translation even though the interviews are not being done in their first language.

And since Libya is now wrecked by the modern conflict and much of the Egyptian coastal strip of the Western Desert has been built up and developed during the last few decades, which have destroyed/transformed much of the original landscape and geography, a film like this from the 1960s may be one of the last good film records of the North African battlefields as they may have looked during the 1940s (not that there's a lack of historical newsreel footage from that theater).

I don't know how good they are, but there are auto-translated English subtitles on the youtube upload version.

Last documentary for history I recommend is "Africa Addio", an Italian-production from the 1960s documenting about the decolonization of Subsaharan Africa. It provides a very aesthetically iconic snapshot of what it was like back then in a number of African countries that were undergoing incredible amounts of social upheaval, civil strife, and outright war, including Mozambique, Zanzibar, Kenya, Congo, and South Africa, among others.

The iconic highlight of the film is the incredible, long sequences of "embedded" combat footage of the Congo Crisis, depicting the European mercenaries in action.

The film footage in the documentary is absolutely authentic, but you should know before you watch it that all of the sound is dubbed in post-production. In that era, Italian filmmakers did not record live sound, and in this film (like many others in the same genre), they used dubbed audio to heighten dramatic effect instead of always going for authentic realism with recreating the sound as it would have been.
 
Bumping this thread to recommend "The Shadow World". It came out recently.
Based on the book The Shadow World, this feature length documentary reveals the shocking realities of the multi-billion dollar global arms trade, through whistleblowers, investigators, prosecutors, and military insiders.
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Does anybody know where to find this documentary? The following is an interview with the creator of the documentary but it is not the actual film itself. The documentary is called "Boys for Sale" and it is a compilation of news reports from the late 1970s and early 1980s.

 
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